The Wikileaks documents show that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has, as Voltaire said about the Bourbon kings of France, learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Her request that American diplomats at foreign postings and the United Nations gather personal data about their foreign counterparts is eerily reminiscent of her use of private detectives to unearth negative information on those who were politically inconvenient during the husband’s campaigns for president and his White House tenure.

At the time, I called these operatives, the “secret police.” Now, apparently, we call them the “diplomatic corps.”

The Wikileaks documents show that you can not only not teach an old dog new tricks, but you can’t stop her from doing the ones she has always done.

The Republican nominating process of 2012 will be totally different from that of other years. In fact, it will be the opposite of what we are used to.

Since the procedural reforms initiated by Democrat George McGovern – that carried over into the Republican Party as well – primaries have determined the winner of the nominations in each party. Iowa and New Hampshire – the first caucus and the first primary in the nation – have tended to sort out the candidates for us. They narrowed down the field and left the rest of the nation with two or three alternatives in each party.

Does President Obama plan to move to the center in response to his overwhelming rejection at the polls on November 2nd? No way! Instead, he is moving to implement, through executive action, two of the most controversial items in his 2010 agenda — a carbon tax and pollution permit system and a ban on the use of secret ballots in union elections. Through executive action by the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the Obama Administration is planning to effectuate both policies without asking Congress.

Is Obama a socialist? A Muslim? Anti-American? Pro-Palestinian? Or just a man who is right sometimes and wrong most of the time? Bill O’Reilly opts for the second option in his new book Pinheads and Patriots.

Bill rigorously focuses on what President Obama does, not on who he is. He refuses to speculate about motivation, preferring instead the more solid ground of observing and frequently condemning his policies. The whole is never larger than the sum of its parts in O’Reilly’s book. In fact, they’re not really added up at all.

In a world fraught with invective, Bill focuses instead on programs, statistics, and facts. Abjuring adjectives, he speaks only in nouns and verbs.

Ever since the abortion debate burst on the American political scene in the wake of the Roe v Wade decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, women have voted more Democratic than men. Particularly unmarried women have since typically backed Democratic candidates – attracted by their pro-choice positions – by between ten and twenty points in each election.

But now the trend has stopped! In one of the most important findings in the post-election polls, the McLaughlin and Associates polling firm has found that men and women both voted for Republican candidates in the 2010 midterm elections! Pollster John McLaughlin – one of the best – noted that “The Republican candidates for Congress had a 12-point advantage among men (53-41) and a 7-point advantage among women (50-43).” This finding is historic.

As the Senate Republican Conference moves to ban earmarking by the chamber’s Republicans, the next question arises: What about the House? Will the new, young, reform-minded Republicans who now populate the lower chamber match the action of the Senate and ban budget-busting earmarks?

Inexplicably, the Senate Republican Conference vote will remain secret. We will have difficulty finding out who were the good guys and who the bad. But we do know that Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) saved the day. With the reformers a few votes shy of victory, he switched sides, dramatically declaring himself in favor of the earmark ban.

Tuesday is the first day of the rest of our lives because on that day we will see if the Republican Party is serious about reform or just mouths the words to get back power.

The Senate Republican caucus is set to vote on a ban on earmarks. Twenty Senators have committed to back the ban and six are opposed. But twenty are still undecided. We need twenty-four to pass the proposal.

Please call your Senator to weigh in! Earmarking is one of the key causes of the massive federal deficit. It promotes projects that are usually wastes of time and money. It is a disgrace that the Republicans did not end this obnoxious practice when they held power in the Senate before the 2006 election. They must commit to ending it now.

Democrats do not forgive defeat very easily. In the week after his “shellacking” in the mid-term elections, Democratic approval of Obama’s performance as president dropped from 88% to 81% in the Zogby Poll, bringing his overall approval down to 43%. When a president starts to shed members of his own party, a vicious cycle has set in which can lead to a primary challenge.

Not from Hillary. At least not yet. She is far too cautious and intertwined with the Administration to be the first to move against Obama. Just as Bobby Kennedy needed a Eugene McCarthy to test the waters for a primary challenge to Lyndon Johnson in 1968, so Hillary Clinton will look to others to try out Obama’s vulnerability to a liberal challenge. As with Kennedy, if it works, she’ll probably jump in. If it doesn’t, she’ll stay on as Secretary of State.

President Obama’s last-ditch attempt to turn out his voter base worked — and changed the 2010 election from a tsunami of epic proportions into a mere catastrophe for the Democrats.

John Zogby’s post-election polling reveals that voters who made up their minds about how to vote within the last week voted Democrat by 57-31 while those who made up their minds earlier backed the Republican candidate, 53-44. Zogby’s data indicated that it made no difference whether the voter decided for whom to vote two or three weeks before the election or more than a month before. Both groups backed Republicans by 10 points. But those who decided in the voting booth or in the week immediately before voting backed the Democrat by large margins.

One of the first orders of business to come up in the new Republican-controlled House of Representatives will be the demand for bailouts of states where expenditures have been especially profligate – California, New York, Michigan, Illinois, and Connecticut. Throughout 2009 and 2010, these states governments have stayed above water by repeated infusions of federal cash. These one-shot stimulus payments must be repeated each year. They are all non-recurring expenditures requiring separate annual appropriations.

The Republican House must say no and hold the line, stopping this raid on the federal Treasury. The cry in the caucus must ring loud: “No More Bailouts!”